Fiction Herald Of The Old Ones

So yeah, Melandra leaves having a modicum of understanding of what's going on with the Welser-Nakors, Torfi's family continues to disintegrate and Stefan officially moves from his old job on with a pocket's worth of Old One Gold and a lot of trauma to show for it.
I hope you enjoyed the chapter and I honestly appreciate all and any comments or reactions you may be gracious enough to gift me!

As an aside, it would be great if, if you enjoyed the story that is, you took a second of your time to go over to ao3 and left a kudo and a comment over there, since it is my main posting site (where by the way chapters of this story will be posted a day early)

 

As an extra sneakpeek that might grab @Scalenex 's attention, here's the work in progress for my Lustrian Bestiary:

 

Hey man, it's alright, the bestiary is still far from done so It's not like i will be dropping it on you by surprise by the end of the week xD.

 

Can't have a lizardmen story without featuring the froggy gang!

 

Interlude I: The Master from the Old Tower

Druids, Jade Wizards, Men of the Order of Life, Agrological Thaumaturgists… Bah! Humbug all of it! Hedge mages, is what they are, literally! Farmers with overgrown egos and a lucky spark for the winds of magic. It is offensive to compare us to them, whose abilities stop at being able to make plants -plants!- Grow fast and crops bigger and little else. Mages the peasants call them! As if four leafed clovers could stand to us who wield fate with our very hands and sight!

-Rant by Bartholomäus Frederick Nepomuk Adelwandsteiner-Bold, tenured professor and Seer of the Celestial College. Recorded by Bartolomi Kereveld in his diary.

Near the Freddo River’s Course, Port Reaver’s Western Plantations, Port Reaver, Settler’s Cove​

17th of Vorgeheim, 2538 IC /40.0.9.11.14 6 Ix 7 Xul​

The changes of the newly started dry season have made themselves clearly seen to the people of Port Reaver. Indeed it has rained only a few times in the weeks following the change of seasons, and the ground is quickly becoming stable enough to work on what few construction projects there are in the city. These projects are few, first because repairing months of deterioration and sinking into the ground for the older buildings takes priority, second because there’s simply no interest or perceived value in constructing anything new.

Instead, all that interest is centered on the dockyards. Because as Stefan’s sore legs have made him relearn, dry season means reaving season. Which translated to the sudden arrival of more ships than what the harbor and felldowns combined can manage, with the Mazza and Scurso bays choking with ships and even more dotting the cove as far as the eye could see.

Stefan had always known this to be, he was a local after all. Less rain meant less treacherous terrain, less risk of sicknesses, less mud traps and things hiding in the muddy shallows. Or at least that he had heard from the coming and going men, Stefan has never walked beyond the treeline himself. As far as he cares, the clogging rains and roasting sun make for equally miserable weather.

But there was a difference between seeing how the traffic would considerably swell for half the year due to this change in the rains and heat, and being involved with it. Before he had liked the dry season for reasons other than the heat itself, it meant more plunderers to steal from arriving every day and more packed streets to weave through during his escapes.

Now he hates it, because more pirates means more ships that need supplying and repairs, much more work coming and going from the Felldown’s chandlers. Now he really understood why Master De Curiel had taken him in with little questioning. He was one of more than a dozen courier and errand lads and he still felt like he was running ragged. The massed streets that he had made use of so much now constantly delayed him, somehow being most packed whenever he was given the most speed-needing dispatches. The streets filled with men looking to buy supplies or manpower before leaving. Or returning and looking to sell the first collections of loot, or to spend said wealth in what little Port Reaver offers, or to get supplies to make the Great Ocean crossing.

Whatever it is, they do business with the chandlers and suppliers of the city, and that means Stefan is spending every waking moment running somewhere. He’s gone from knowing his way through the backstreets and hays of Port Reaver’s core to knowing every beaten dirty road beyond the new city walls, be it on the east where there’s actual walls or the west where the workshops just lead into open farming fields.

He’s in one of the latter right now, just having run past the Pozza, the old lagoon that had supplied Port Reaver with freshwater in its early years. Now, and for much longer than Stefan has even been alive, it's a brackish and polluted thing. Why would people use it to dispose of all manner of things when the sea is within eyesight the kid doesn’t really get. But the point is he can see birds on long stilt-like legs picking at what refuse people threw in earlier this morning and he has no interest in taking a sip or a bath with the hogs sitting in its shallows.

Beyond the Pozza there’s a good stretch that is just plantations to the right and small pens to the left. Small indeed, not much cattle in Port Reaver, just explorer’s horses waiting to be moved out or the odd oxen outside of tilling season munching on the grasses.

None of the cabins and sheds he encounters are his objective. He keeps walking until he reaches an area of cleared jungle not used for food. Instead it’s simply an area of bare earth that spends most of the year as a quagmire. Created by a combination of abundant rains, the nearby and often flooded Freddo river and the fact that the ground here is often overturned and dug up.

It’s not a quarry, at least not in the way he knows them to exist in the Old World. It’s not rock or metal that is torn from the rock with pickaxes. That simply doesn’t exist here.

No, it’s bone that workers -slaves- dig up here from the red soil and mud. Massive bones that is, some are big enough that it takes years to dig them up. Stefan remembers that ribcage sticking out of the ground, as tall as two stories and buried deep enough that the rest of the carcass, if there’s one, is still deeply buried under the waterlogged clearing.

The Thunderlizard Boneyard is one of the few local and true exports of the city. Everything else is just cargo moving in or out of the New World. But every single day that the weather permits it men go out to the boneyard to continue digging up the valuable skeletons of massive creatures Stefan is happy no never have seen alive. As he arrives, a team of six branded men are loading onto a cart what he at first assumes to be leg bones, but their amount soon proves to be fingerbones.

Stefan is there to deliver a message to their taskmaster. He doesn’t know why his master, a ship outfitter, deals with people who sell bones but he also knows not to waste time inquiring. So he just gives the pieces of paper (written over dozens of times and now almost without space for new missives) and catches his breath resting his back against the shadow offered by what looks like a vertebra the size of an anvil. A part of him remembers that the only reason he recognizes the bones by shape was the diet he was offered at the orphanage, a place where getting stew made from the bones of a dead horse’s tail bones made for celebratory delicacies.

He’s happy he ended up buying himself those shoes, but right now he loves his waterskin even more. It’s a bit ratty, but it has no holes, so he’s able to take as many gulps of water as he wants to without waste. If only it was as cold as when he had gotten it from the well early in the morning.

He waits for a few more minutes as the taskmaster and another man, maybe another foreman or the bonayard’s owner, have a heated discussion. He ignores their words and enjoys the light breeze that picks up.

He’s sitting looking west towards the Freddo, mostly because with it being morning, that’s where the bone’s shadow covers him.

The Freddo river makes up Port Reaver’s western boundary. A widening of it, almost a lake, of calm waters makes up the northwestern boundary of Port Reaver’s cleared out area. Stefan watches as a group of men slowly sails down it on rafts made from and pulling entire tree trunks. The logging camp which supplies the entirety of Port Reaver but especially the Felldown shipyards lies directly north up the Freddo’s course. Convenient seeing as to how the river’s mouth is at the Felldowns. Stefan himself has never visited the logging camp.

The logging camp is beyond the treeline, and he’s not a fool.

There’s also people gathered there. Women gathering water or cleaning clothes, men fishing. And children playing on the water’s edge. They must be the children of craftsmen and merchants to have the luxury of play, he notes with envy. A privilege he and the rest of the orphans -who outnumber the fostered children by an unhealthy margin- don’t get.

A part of him feels resentment, but he quells it pretty fast. After all, they are just a father’s infected wound or unpaid debt from poverty. Or a mother’s fever away from Saint Sissy’s. Orphans don’t grow on trees, and there’s a lot of whys as to them outnumbering the other children.

All in all, Stefan has a very good, but specially safe, viewpoint of what happens next.

It starts with a child’s cries. And by child Stefan doesn’t mean a fourteen year old like himself pushing young manhood. He hears what sounds like a toddler’s cries. What’s worse is that it’s not a toddler crying in the way toddlers tend to cry all day long. It’s a toddler’s cries in the way that makes one think of the worst.

The light crowd at the water’s edge, the ferrying loggers and the boneyard serfs all move to get a better view of what might be going on. Stefan gets up and precariously stands up on top of the vertebra to get a better view. The crowd congeals and some of the fishing men get up to act on it.

But then it breaks the water surface, and the crying grows too deafening to come from a child’s lungs, too droning to come from a human’s lungs at all.

It breaches from under one of the log bundles, making a couple of the oar-wielding men lose their footing and one fall into the water. The shape moves forward half-swimming and half-galloping.

Bands of black and white blur into a long body of gray that lunges for the crowd. Said crowd obscures Stefan’s view. But the people scream and the crows disperses like a rotting fruit under a man’s boot. The shape is visible again as it turns around with an explosion of foaming water. Reeds and water plants go flying as it completely changes course for the opposite direction, back towards the Freddo.

The last thing Stefan sees is the entirely too small human shape its tail is curled around. But a blink later the sinuous appendage and the child’s body also disappear. People are screaming, most of all an anguished woman who wades into the water, collapsing as she loses her footing on the mud. She bites and fights back as one of the men, the logger who was shaken from his simple raft, wrestles her back out of the no longer calm lake waters.

“Kid!” Someone, the taskmaster Stefan realizes, shouts. He turns around and jumps off the vertebrae spurs. The man pushes the paper back into his chest.

“Get this to el Curiel!” He commands. “But first go to the Ċittadella,get whoever looks the most important, the constable, or the head guard I don’t give a shit! And tell them we just had a damned water daemon attack!” The man orders hurriedly, Stefan’s hand clutches the piece of paper, crumpling it.

He wants to ask questions, a bunch of them, such as “what the hell just happened?” or “who am I supposed to talk to?” or chief of all “what the hells just happened?!” but the man doesn’t afford him the chance.

He pushes Stefan, and when that elicits no running he grabs a handful of Stefan’s dark blonde hair and uses it to awkwardly pull him into running forwards. Stefan’s legs do the rest as his instincts kick into motion, It’s a simple issue really, pain elicits a desire to escape, and escape here means orders.

Soon enough he’s sprinting eastwards across the tobacco and cotton fields, parallel to the walls until he goes through the Sprania gate.

Then all he has to do is run the entirety of Port Reaver’s main road into Re Island. Usually he would complain about having to take the busiest and most constricting roadway. But the image of a child being pulled underwater not to surface again makes for a good enough incentive.

The Ċittadella, Re Island, Port Reaver, Settler’s Cove​

The wooden bridge to Re island is guarded, but the guards don’t spot him, or ask him why he’s so hurried. They are mostly there to keep the peace and handle the constant stream of people crossing in both directions. There’s all kinds of people who, like him, have something to do related to the king’s fortress. All manner of things, merchants carrying their wares to sell, workers bringing in supplies. Captains and first mates are coming and going with offers or demands. Quartermasters as well, some to establish bounties, some to demand they be overturned and some to claim rewards for bounties in the name of their crews. And for each one of those, there’s twice the amount of more people, workers and sailors leaving or going to the ships moored in Re’s northwestern limits, which makes up off of the arms of the half-moon shaped harbor.

And there’s a lot of people also heading for farther into Re, mostly sailors and locals. The Sunken Cloister draws them in. All in all the bridge is only slightly less crowded than the streets he’s made his way through to get here.

Map of Re Island: Historic home of Port Reaver’s Pirate Lords and their ancient Ċittadella fortress (1) along sides the equally old Trident, one of Port Reaver’s two lighthouses and entrance to the Sunken Cloister, a subterranean temple complex underneath the seafloor of Port Reaver's harbor dedicated to Stromfels and Manann. The Island is connected on the west with a wooden bridge to the harbor and key locations such as the Doganale House (2) and rebuilt Grails District (7). On the East, Re Island is protected by Barricata Island on the entrance to Mazza Bay.​

However, the looming shape of the fortress, with its four massive towers and walls of gray and weathered stone, begets a question Stefan hasn’t considered asking yet.

“Now what?”

After all, he’s never visited the Ċittadella before, he has no idea what to do to get in or who constitutes “someone important” in the fortress, he’s pretty sure he’s not supposed to get in touch with King Borg himself. And he’s got no idea what a constable is or if a head guard looks any different from a normal guard. As far as he knows the guards are just pirates who no longer sail, and yet aren’t considered stragglers, and get to get away with shaking people up or beating them up, how are they supposed to help with a daemon-kidnapping?

Stefan realizes he doesn’t even know how to get in. Will the guards just let him walk in like at the bridge? He doesn’t feel like they would. Usually he just catches people in their workshops or waits by office doors after knocking.

Is he supposed to knock on the massive portcullis? That doesn’t feel right either. There’s a smaller and open door built into the structure of the closed fortress gates, and that one is open. Does he knock on that one? Does he walk in on what he assumes is a patio?

“Sorry, uh… I was told I needed to talk with the ‘constable’?” Eventually he settled for just asking the guardsmen.

“You aren’t one of our usual message boys, who sent you?” One of them asks.

“I… Uh.” The memory of the hectic attack way too short a time ago breaks up his train of thought. “There’s been an attack!” He managed under the stare of the men, they don’t look angry or bothered by him yet, mostly just annoyed at having to deal with him.

“So? We are not the only guards in the city, you know? You could have gotten any of the patrols instead of us.” The man answers admonishingly.

“No, no it was a… A Daemon! Water Beast”

That 's it. That’s all it takes for everyone who hears him to come to a full stop. It’s taken young Stefan entirely too long but the reality finally catches up to him. He’s just been witness to an ahuizotl, a waterborne aberration even by lustrian standards, taking a child not much younger than himself.

“Never swim in the calm lakes, Ahuizotl's home is underneath the calm lakes, if you swim too far from the edge his tail will grab you and pull you down.” He vaguely remembers in a maternal but faded voice he can ascribe no face to.

The guardsmen quickly change in demeanor. “Get the kid talking, I’ll get everyone else.” One of them orders before turning for the threshold. Around Stefan the crowd grows agitated. There’s not been an attack for more than a year after the last round-ups. The guard who stays indeed grills him for information.

Who sends him? Where did it happen? How many people were there? How long did it take him to get to the Ċittadella? Weren’t there any patrols he could have told on his way?

The question continues as the crowd grows rowdier and calls and shouted orders leave the fortress.

The final question of “How many children did it take?” Is answered as they are forced to move aside by the gates opening with a crackling of wood and scraping of unused hinges and pulleys. The man’s expression turns grateful when he answers with “I only saw one.”

Then the men, guardsmen, start walking out in a loose formation. They are ex-pirates, every rankman in Port Reaver, including the Stragglers, who isn’t a dog of war is an ex-pirate. But most ex-pirates are ex because they no longer make for good pirates.

That’s not the case for the city or king’s guard. They are such good pirates, Stefan has heard, that they do not have to be pirates anymore. Just like how the king used to be such a good captain he gets to not command a ship anymore, commanding Port Reaver instead.

They look the part, all dressed in different clothes and bits of armors but all in the same colors, strips of red and white. Many wear pins or have the same symbol embroidered onto their chests. The king’s laughing board on a gold coin. Stefan remembers back when it was all black clothes and an ax-wielding skeleton. And even before when they wore checkered greens and yellows with a coiled seadrake. Or even the one month when they didn’t have the time to make “uniforms” and simply made themselves seen with white clocks. None have lasted as long as the red-and-white stripes of the smiling and tusked skull.

They don’t all carry the same weapons, but they all carry the same types of weapons. Only a few of them have flintlocks, but all the flintlocks are on identical holsters. Half have cutlasses which look identical, the other half have boarding axes, knives, daggers or clubs somewhere on their person. A couple even have bigger pistols or bandoliers of round gray balls and he even spots an arquebus slung on the back of a man who's talking with…

“Stromfels…” Stefan can’t help but mutter.

The man is dressed in the finest clothes Stefan has ever seen. Much better than any pirate lord he’s sneaked a look at or any merchant he carried messages to or from. The clothes are also mostly white and red but much less garish or eye-seraring. Instead it's the quality of the material that gives him off.

Long coat despite the heat, a muted but noticeable red in color. Under that Stefan can see an impeccable white cotton shirt and hole-less trousers held by a leather belt with large holsters to it. A large red sash tied over the man’s coat around his belly draws Stefan’s sight upwards again, where he finds the scarred face of a man with a long and voluminous beard staring back with brown, deeply angry, eyes shaded by a bicorn hat decorated and threaded with what look like tusks.

“Is he the one who brought the alarm?” King Bastjan Borg himself asks. Stefan realizes it’s not that the King asks him, but the guard who had disappeared into the gates and who was now standing by their king.

The curt “It is, my king.” Earns a grunt and a quickly given order, “We take him with us, I want all the information we can get.”

With that the man with the long musket gives an order in a tongue Stefan doesn’t know. And the gathered men, more than fifty, start marching out and pushing and dissolving the crowd. King at the head like a raging boar. Stefan doesn’t need to be ordered to follow. At least he’s grateful that following the guardsmen means not dealing with the mashed streets twice in such a short span of time. The gate’s guard walks side by side with him.

“And someone get me the fucking huntsmen NOW!” Belows the King’s voice, on the opposite side of the column but still easily breaking the cacophony of a city suddenly in high alert.

Port Reaver is a ruthless place, but it tends to forget the cursed land surrounding it.

A Ts’ono’ot Near Port Reaver, Settler’s Cove​

18th of Vorgeheim, 2538 IC /40.0.9.11.15 7 Men 8 Xul​

The cenote is not too dissimilar from the thousands of others that dot the isthmus’ jungles. Natural pits, sinkholes, resulting from the collapse of limestone bedrock after thousands of years of weathering which exposed groundwater. The Lizardmen, who call these inundated pits tsʼono’ots, have used them as sources of clean water or to sacrifice much to the Old One Tzunki for a very long time as well.

But not all of them, because not all of these open-air pools of deep water are made equal. Many are open-water pools of murky waters, inhabited by plenty of common fish and amphibians, frequented watering holes. Most are connected by long and complex cave systems, spreading all over Lustria’s underground like the hollows left by the roots of a missing tree the size of the world. These would make for a great Lustrian Underway, were it not for their inundated and twisting tunnels, covered in rocky outcrops, stalagmites and stalactites which act like the writing tentacles of a grasping cephalopodic monster.

But some are even worse, by account of their inhabitants. They are home to deceptively clear waters, shining like mirrors of aquamarine and topaz when undisturbed, which can only be reached at the bottom of sheer rock walls in the thin-necked shape of a great jar. Pools of cold water where the sun only reaches with the midday hours, pools too treacherous to enter or leave by climbing. Some of these are purely dangerous by their unpredictable shapes, for their walls are home to little more than huntipedes or bats, and their waters are home to fish and amphibians which cannot snatch anything much larger than the rare fallen bird.

But some -few, rare and isolated from one another as they are- are worse, much worse. Worse than even the occasional case of a larger animal stepping too close to a cenote’s entrance, triggering a partial collapse and widening of the sinkhole and dooming itself to a watery death. Even worse than this death by fall-and-drowning, something lurks.

A forgotten remnant of a war of armies the size of nations. Of stellar artillery and gaping toothed ravines like open wounds in reality. The Great Cataclysm is the name it possesses in High Saurian. In the Book of Grudges it is recorded, remembered as the beginning of the saga known as the Doom of Grimnir. All elves, irregardless of bloodline, creed or allegiance, remember it as the aberrant forge whose fire cast Aenarion the Defender and the Great Vortex into existence. Only the most ancient of man’s records remember the forgotten age of the Great Catastrophe, Nehekhara remembers it proudly, for its gods were born in nothing else but the hundred year long battles for the River of Life against horrors dwelling under the sands. Terrifyingly common is the fact that most human nations retale their histories to the end of great migrations whose triggers are blessedly forgotten. It is not extreme to state that the evils and maladies of the world are all the scarred tissue of this ancient stab to the world’s heart.

One such malady breaks the surface of one such forbidden tsʼono’ot, it has arrived here through the labyrinthine web of inundated tunnels from the rivers whose contours make its feeding grounds. Its long limbs, ending in too-human four fingered hands of claw-nails, grasps onto the limestone, allowing it to pull itself up to the ledge on the sinkhole wall it calls a nest.

A body follows it, an entirely too tiny head firmly grasped by the appendage armid the thing’s tail. The body of the long-drowned child is dropped onto the ledge unceremoniously, the beast will rest for a bit before enjoying a meal of cold and wet flesh.

It has swum here quickly, a long sinuous body allowing it to use even the most narrow crevices of the cave systems. Lanky limbs have propelled it all the way there and back. Despite how thin they might seem, or how their slightly uneven lengths give it a tumbling gait, they have an unnatural strength and dexterity to them.

The animal shakes itself like a parody of a wet pup. Its fur is in a marbled gray and black pattern, but patches of bristles and quills break up any illusion of a healthy or natural pelt. Horn-like growths are visible among the aerated fur, they grow at the hips, the tail-tip, the left flank and shoulder, the top of the head as well. Not a single one is of even shape or length, they grow like too many plants in a small pot, bidding for space in the flesh and skin.

Pustules, which can be found all over the face and major joints, pop and gush as it scratches its head with a hindlimb. Its stare is absent and gaze is lost. It seems not to even notice as one of the sacs, so big and close to the socket that it has malformed the eye, explodes with yellow filth and covers the now decompressing eye in a film of piggery. The vacant stare combines with a long-hinged mouth of fang-shaped molars in a creepily absent smile.

Meanwhile, a massive tail as long as the body itself writhes and grabs with a mind of its own. The three-fingered hand on its tip opens and closes randomly. The three fingers, arranged like a triangle, find purchase in the bones of an old hunt, the skull of a smallish hydrodon. The teeth growth in the hand-tail’s palm gnaw at the weathered bone with underdeveloped tendons pulling and releasing them, the palm releases a substance half saliva and half urine. It tries to eat, but there’s no mouth, much less a throat or stomach to swallow. The tail indeed has a mind of its own, a mind condemned to starvation.

The thing eventually picks up its real meal, a long tongue forked like bush branches licks with the texture of shark-skin as the mutant enjoys a meal. It shall eat all, clothes included. It always eats everything when it snatches a human child. It doesn’t know why, why should it? The instincts of something that deals in the warped metaphysical cannot be expected to pilot a body of flesh with anything other than chaotic zeal.

It will leave a single item uneaten however. It doesn’t know why, but this ahuizotl, this water daemon, shall swallow all bones but the skull, which it will break to consume the mind-guts, but otherwise will enormously dump back into the cenote’s water. Whereupon it will meet with hundreds of other human and reptilian skulls at the bottom. Forming a pile the monster knows not the significance of.

It is a filthy, long and thorough process as it consumes. It knows to eat everything it can, because its malformed instincts might simply forget to remind it of hunger and starvation as it swims the cave waters for the following weeks or months. It even has to fight its own tail for the food, biting it until it bleeds while the hand stabs into the real mouth’s gums. But it continues nonetheless.

The process does have a single positive to it, however, it distracts the hulking, scatterbrained and lanky ahuizotl.

The Ahuizotl: One of the last living, and most warped, remnants of the Great Ctastrophe’s stain upon Lustria.
​

Many of its peers meet their fates at the hands of specially trained Skink patrols. Others get shot by hunters and mercenaries on commission of the warmblooded jarls, pirate kings and governors of the ports where they’ve found their favored meals for hundreds of years. Some even fall prey to Lustria’s own nature, inherently brutal as it is even by a daemon-beast’s standards, this very specific creature’s “mate” was crushed few months ago by the bite of a proterosudon, the crocodilian’s many needle-like teeth puncturing “her'' like a cushion to no reaction from the now lonely man-eater. A few even succumb to the maladies inherent to their mutations by themselves.

This one won’t, for it does not notice as a writhing mass climbs -no, grows- over the lip at the cenote’s top. Tendrils move and grow, falling in like swinging ropes but quickly rooting themselves to the walls upon contact. They keep falling and growing, almost obscuring the cenote, like spilled entrails, continuing their growth. It is an unnatural growth, these vines’, for they grow deeper into the cenote, a direction opposite to what one would expect from any sun-seeking plant.

And yet these do grow down and towards the humid dark at the bottom. Soon one single unassuming vine is upon the ledge seeking a very specific stimulus. The unmistakable stain of chaos upon an unlucky specimen of what millenia ago might have been harmless water-going mammals.

Engrossed in its meal, the ahuizotl doesn’t hear nor feel anything notable as the vines continue to contour and grow into and around the ledge, cupping it and securing themselves, some grow thick and become truly bark-covered trunks for the vine network.

When it comes, the mutant doesn’t feel the attack of constrictive serpents. It knows what such an attack feels like, the sudden bite of the boa followed by the mass of its long body coiling and giving pressure.

It feels like a whipping, like a chain pulled taunt suddenly snapping and swinging with just force as to dig into flesh unluckily located within the arch it swings with.

There’s an attempt to jump, to escape the sudden ambush, but a limb is already held too tightly, bones creaking and stopping the entire body’s momentum. The beast messily falls without leaving the ledge, it does so on top of the half-eaten body. Like revenge, the wetness of spilled blood and guts makes it harder for the monster to move, it tries to pull itself over the ledge with its ape-ish hands, but as its snout touches the waterline it is yanked back.

What follows is minutes of slow, as plant growth is bound to be, and agonizing constriction, suffocation and bone shattering pain. Roots grow into flesh, sapping unclean blood to begin a long process of purification.

It is a horrible, disgusting and absolutely deserved execution.

The skull heap shall not grow anymore.

Old Abandoned Tower, Outskirts of Port Reaver, Settler’s Cove​

The comatose body of Cryston von Danling awakes, the old man shudders and coughs as he rises from the cold floor of his study, plants in their pots around him quickly withering due to the vitae he’s been forced to extract from them, suddenly becoming aware again of his entirely too old body. It is taxing to cast his personally modified spells. A combination of elements of Forest of Thorns, Living Mire and Vital Growth spells he’s entirely proud of having managed without getting a tree to grow out of his chest in the process, he doesn’t know who to thank for the most: Lustria’s vast natural pull of Ghyran’ or the bronze triskelion hanging from his necklace, which hums as it overworks its inbuilt protections to fix the insanity of what he’s just done or his own skills.

Casting the Straggling Vines is hard, life threateningly hard, hard enough that he’s seriously considering whether it is worth finally putting the process to writing in his notes for future jade wizards to learn. Especially considering how useless it is against anything other than the most braindead of foes, such as the one he’s just snapped the neck of.

Casting it alongside Lie of the Land and Nature’s Whisper in order to be able to do it remotely. He is honestly expecting to have a heart attack any minute now. Maybe, he laughs with a wheeze, he’s already had it and hasn’t noticed yet.

He doesn’t regret doing it, but is also fully aware that he’s just used the last of his reserves after years of meditative inaction. This is an amount of exhaustion no Fat of the Land spell can fix. Much less having just killed the last of his living conduits.

Luckily, as he walks down the spiraling stairs of his derelict tower, by now a crowd must have gathered to deal with the tragedy he had witnessed hours ago from the observatory’s windows.

A part of him is curious, how many Pirate Kings has he slept and meditated away since he last opened the tower’s gate? Another is dreadful, reminding him that events have begun to unfold much bigger than any innocent child’s dark fate.

But mostly, as he walks out for the first time in decades, he wonders if the King he sees in the dispute will be willing to pay the ahuizotl’s bounty in tower repairs, meals and a new bed or why the young man standing awkwardly by the city’s master has an ethereal bird standing on his shoulder.

 

On the one hand, there's chaos warped animals in Lustria! Not good news!
On the other hand, at least there's people willing to fuck them up! And capable of it!

The map in this chapter was made by Planjanusza like all the Port Reaver stuff. And the disgusting Ahuizotl was drawn by my friend Matkoc. Show them some love!

@Scalenex Work is going along nicely on my "Lustrian Bestiary" project, and you all should keep an eye out for a proper oneshot for Lustria Unbound I'll be posting next week.

As an aside, it would be great if, if you enjoyed the story that is, you took a second of your time to go over to ao3 and left a kudo and a comment over there, since it is my main posting site (where by the way chapters of this story will be posted a day early usually).
P.S. I will be releasing a non-lizardmen oneshot for Lustria Unbound soon on ao3, so keep a look out for that one.

 

Oh damn I've been posting these here in the wrong order, I'll get to fixing that tonight...

They are all correct on ao3 tho.

 

@Killer Angel chapters have all been fixed, enjoy the read!

 

Damn Angel, you really know how to make a writer blush :3

 

For those interested, Herald of the Old Ones is currently the center piece of the Lustria Unbound series, of which only one other of the current four installments is avaliable here on Lustria Online:

• Only Fools Wander Into The Jungles, this short story is effectively the backstory of the eponymous Herald.
• A Father By Any Other Name (only avaliable in ao3), When an elven eagleship is shipwrecked somewhere in the swirling swamps and mangrove forests of southern Lustria, what a wandering Kroxigor finds inside its ruins will forever change his simple life and that of the strange warmblooded hatchling he finds.
• The Webweaver (only avaliable in ao3), A survivor ponders his place in the cruel web of fate; an ambitious spider approaches this prey with designs of their own.

Please do check them out, they'll make the experience of reading Herald much richer! (and do leave kudos and comments please)

 

Sadly I haven't, so busy with class and my own writing that I barely have the time to read other's work.

 

Chapter 9: Entrepreneuring

The Lizardmen, under our definition of trade, do not trade.

Oh, they trade plenty in the sense that they exchange goods, their artisanal and artistic industries are ever growing. But they do not engage in mercantile trade. Especially if one looks into internal trade. Simply put: The Lizardmen view something such as trade within their “Great Plan Worldview” as subversive or even blasphemous. From their point of view if a city, army or any other kind of grouping requires a resource or service it is their duty to supply it.

If, let’s say, a temple city requires metals for a rapid military expansion all settlements close enough for transport to be practical will send the entirety of their surplus of this hypothetical metal until they receive word that the demand has been met and then some with no expectation of repayment or reward. Lizardmen do not negotiate inter-city military collaboration or treaties on armed cooperation, they simply discuss a plan of action assuming (correctly) that all involved parties will do as they are asked to. What use are trade routes, to them they are simply the pathways for whatever they need to get to them, which they already own as a collective.

In this way, one could bizarrely claim that any given Lizardman is the most wealthy being in the world, as any given Lizardman can demand, and has at his disposal, anything his brethren have.

This has created large problems for those wishing to conduct trade with Lizardmen polities. First, because of the Lizardmen’s alien stance on concepts like currency, payments or contracts. Second, because this species-wide resource pool and uncompromising allocation system makes it simply hard for traders to have anything the Lizardmen may need. Because of this, even to this day, all peaceful trade with them is carried between merchants and individual Lizardmen interested in bartering for specific items. These go from liked foodstuffs to artisanal trinkets, decorative or artistic pieces, and tools. But never, to the chagrin of human and elven traders alike, have the Lizardmen felt an interest in trade at a scale which could make their material riches available to the world.

-Excerpt from the Collected Lectures on Lustria by Gottlieb Ochsner. Volume III: Trade and Commerce in the New World.

Governor General’s Private Office, Waldeswacht Fortress, Sudburg, Settler’s Cove​

21st of Vorgeheim, 2538 IC /40.0.9.11.18 10 Etz’nab’ 11 Xul​

Governor-General of Sudburg, Siegmund Armbruster’s title and position, in and of themselves, represent a failure. It is not his failure that they represent, but a failure he is reminded of every morning as he readies himself for another working day. “All days are working days,” his bones complain.

Governor, as the title begins, already denotes a failure. A thirteen year long string of failures at trying to establish Sudburg as a proper imperial port. Because every piece of land under the emperor’s hold, from the grandest duchies to the least of lordling estates, is under the jurisdiction of one of the 11 Electoral Provinces. And sure, there’s a thousand lesser exceptions and nitpicks, as homogeneity is anathema to the empire. But every man can at least live with the assurance of who of the eleven represents him at the grandest of councils. But not the people of Sudburg.

And this was far from being due to the city’s status as a colony.

Neuland, grabbing onto Albion’s rainy cliffs, made into a full province under Leopold von Stroheim’s rule by Imperial decree.

Leopoldheim, a blasted penal colony on the Southland’s New Coast. Part of the Barony of Nordland and keps well stocked with healthy shipfulls of convicted criminals ready to be sent off.

Blastes Sudenburg, Sudburg’s chief rival port across the sea in the Medes Gulf, under the lordship of the Von Kaufmans, a petty family distantly related to Nuln’s counts, but Wissenlander nobles nonetheless and as such part of the industrious electoral countship.

Even the Mangrove Port, a shoddy and ruined settlement assailed by the heretical undead, rivaled only by the filth of Swamp Town if hearsay is to be believed (which he very much does on this occasion). Even such a well known to be rotten locale was kept “well” supplied and standing as a loan to the High Elves.

But Sudburg? After 13 years of steady growth, had Sudburg been claimed or made into a formal imperial hold? No, it had not. Which meant that as he sat in his office and received the most pressing of the morning’s issues from his aides, he had no such standing to rely upon. Every issue facing Sudburg, from the lack of resources to resettle the people massed in the shantytowns which hugged the hill-city’s walls, to the ever present threat of the pirates and reavers they had for neighbors. Even matters as tedious as who he was supposed to collect the taxes in the name of, as he couldn't do it in his own name, or having to pay tithes to someone else higher up who didn’t exist, according to the taxman. Meaning he was committing treason, they shouted, and yet never returned with a force to bring him to justice as they had threatened to do. Simply because there was no one to go to who he had robbed.

After years of safer and safer trade, of growing exports and steady supplies for incoming expeditions, had any entrepreneuring lordlings or third sons made an attempt to claim Sudburg? A few had, Siegmund remembers two of them in his tenure so far. The first, dead within the month due to disease. The second? Lost to the jungles.

Of course, there’s very good and reasonable reasons for Sudburg’s and his predicament, reasons that don’t do a man’s mind well to dwell on lest desperation grab a hold of his heart.

As the morning goes on and he attends to his duties. He adjudicates this or that ruling (as there are no ways to formally establish a code of law or demand judges for Sudburg), deals with what business he needs to deal to keep more food coming in than leaving (often by force of bribe) and makes sure his efforts to keep the city’s lower reaches from sinking (literally or figuratively) are not being squandered.

Thankless duties one and all, he receives nothing beyond his wage as a veteran and imperial general, which might have made him a man of wealth were they not forcefully part of Sudburg’s budget.

Some days, such as this one, he wonders who he wronged to get such a blasted posting, he knows this to be the case. It’s simply a matter of his “prison” isolation, also making it impossible to trace back to the origins of the most honorable imperial posting that has made him governor of a no-man’s land.

“Heh.” He dryly laughs to himself as he continues pouring over reports, charters, contracts and all it takes to hold together the stringless puppet he is head of.

“Not man’s, for sure, definitely not this one’s.” He titters to himself.

Grazing Pastures in the Outskirts of Pahuax, Pahuax, Jungles of Pahualaxa
21st of Vorgeheim, 2538 IC /40.0.9.11.18 10 Etz’nab’ 11 Xul​

If there’s something Elma truly appreciates about the dry season, it is how the lack of copious rains makes Pahuax and it’s surroundings much more easy to traverse.

Oh, the canals and aqueducts of the city make sure something like inundation simply does not happen within Pahuax. But rain, in a city cursed to be covered in ash come every sunrise, makes for a bothersome producer of ashy silts and clogged puddles. And that’s without taking into consideration the state the rainy season puts the land outside of the walls in. She may not interact with the fields and jungle often herself, but there’s a limited amount of mud-covered youths any woman should have to deal with, and she does her year’s quota in a single week of rain. At least there’s no winter, she still remembers the winters of the before, and she does not miss them.

No, Elma is a woman of the dry season, even if it’s not truly that dry at this point. The land and rivers are still healthy with the reserves created by the rain. Case in point, as she exits through the wide open gates of Huanchi, she is met with the sight of an open prairie of green grass and leafy ferns on either side of the road.

It’s a good few leagues before the jungle proper starts, giving space for Pahuax’s more area-dependent industries. Low rock walls mark the limits of orchards, while the tannery is buzzing with activity in the distance, long rows of sun-drying pelts and leathers hooked tight onto their panels. But of course the bulk of the space, decorated with strewn monoliths like the city itself, is occupied by large grazing pastures and pens.

The great bulk of them are hydrodons, common duck-billed herbivores which feed the warriors and their meat-eating mounts, or livestock of very different breeds from those of the land she believes she comes from. Men raise their hairless hogs, horned ruminants and poultry. Lizardmen keep the smaller but feistier kitams, the hairless heartbeasts and many kinds of junglefowl.

She passed by one such junglefowl coop, a quaint wooden structure full of scurrying jungle quails. She likes cooking those, maybe she’ll get a few on the trip back?

She also passes by a familiar face as she continues looking for her herd-tending quarry. She moves aside, out of the main road, to let an arriving caravan of lumber-carrying bastiladons have ample space.

The massive armored animals are directed by their skink tenders, some carry piles of logs on their backs, secured to their shells with platforms of sisal rope and wood, while others have harnesses fastened to their shell’s sideways and downwards protruding spikes. Harnesses with which they pull large sleds with rolling logs placed under them for wheels.

It is from the back of the second of the three armored animals that Ewart, one of her fellow xho’za’khanxs, greets her. He is only five years younger than her, and has been working on the logging camps outside Pahuax for as long as he’s been able to labor at all. He waves at her with his free hand while the other one keeps hold of the long pole he uses for directing the simple-minded animal. She’s seen the half-head shaved breton do it many times before, lightly tapping the armored head of the bastiladon in different spots to get it to move in the direction or with the haste associated with the spot.

He doesn’t have the time to stop and talk, as the massive sled pulled by his ride is being serviced by a fast team of skinks who take the logs left behind and place them at the front quickly and efficiently, letting the sled move at a continuous pace.

The massive by size but small by numbers procession of lumber carriers continues moving in the direction opposite to hers, so soon enough she's on the stone-block road again and walking towards her objective again.

It’s one of the better pens, with walls of stone as tall as her chest and plenty of shade from an aoacatl tree. In said shade are also a large pile of freshly cut ferns and a large stone trough dug into the ground, both there to remain cool for the pen’s inhabitants.

Said inhabitants, in Elma’s opinion, are the cutest stegadon calves she’s ever seen. They are small, for their kind, at a size not far from that of a tapir, if proportionally broader. Their horns are barely there, little more than studs on their faces and short frills. There’s little in the way of the armor their elders have on their backs, tails and sides, but she can see where said features are beginning to grow. They are colorful as well, sporting patterns of foliage greens and complex browns, camouflage they don’t need here, protected as they are. They do what she has come to expect of younglings of any species: Eat, nap and play. Some munch on the greenery present in their paddock or the pile of ferns while others focus on the ripe and fallen fruits of the aoacatl, enjoying the tasty green flesh of the fruit while swallowing its large seeds whole. Others chase each other while chirping and braying, or play fighting by clumsily butting heads or rubbing and shaking their sides and tails against each other.

Stegadon calves grow fast and become dangerous early in life, no matter how endearing they might seem.
​

It is one of the napping ones, in a sun-warmed spot by the opposite side of the wall, that draws her attention, first because of its very striking colors, a vivid orange calf with red markings on the edges of its undeveloped frill and armor.

Of course, it also draws her attention that the calf’s head is resting on her brother’s lap as he, half-asleep himself, slowly rubs its head.

She slowly circles the perimeter until she’s just behind, with only the wall between them. She climbs over it, shitting on the top with her legs dangling by Roland’s head.

He doesn’t greet her or acknowledge her.

“What? Still angry that I talked things out with the Amazons?” She starts with a laugh, a grunt is what she gets for an answer from her little blood-brother. Her brother had hoped to organize a grand and formal send-off celebration for the three of their spawn-siblings who had left with the Amazons, and her working with their leader, Melandra, had quickly killed said planning.

She was proud of what he had indeed managed to organize when she had told him of her last encounter with the warparty leader and how she had pushed them towards leaving soon and unseen, and had told him as much. But her brother was one for theatrics no matter how stoick he attempted to seem, and it’d take a few more days of sulking before he would relent in his animal-aided brooding and admit to her making the right choice in avoiding chances for further conflict or, Old Ones forbid, endangering any of them..

“So,” She begins anew, ready to set the bait. “I’ve noticed some of our hosts' stockpiles are running low…” She hints.

“Mmmh…” He grunts again, his eyes finally opening to warily look up at her.

“Do you know what that means?” She very much baits him.

“That you need to get better at logistics? Maybe ask elder Prakesh-to to help you sun up?” He bites.

“Nope! It means time for the herald to herald again! Because you.” She pokes his head with her foot. “Are taking a trading caravan to visit our lovely friends at Sudburg!”

“Uggggh…” He moans, still keeping his lap-stegadon comfortable.

“Come on, you love going to Sudburg, it’s the biggest chunk of your Heralding!” She knows he cannot argue against that, he takes his title’s accompanying duty with a commitment that makes her proud and him very easy to goad.

“Not for trading!” He tries to argue.

He fails, he’s terrible at arguing with her, as any little brother should be. By day’s end he’ll be halfway done with arranging everything alongsides her.

Streets of Port Reaver, Port Reaver, Settler’s Cove
21st of Vorgeheim, 2538 IC /40.0.9.11.18 10 Etz’nab’ 11 Xul​

Stefan has made five trips so far today between the felldowns and the scaffolding-covered tower at the edge of the jungle. All he knows is that Master Azzarello is the most stressed and angry he’s seen the woman so far, and that said pressure has trickled down to his own job. And of course de Curiel has been making him deliver most of the back and forth between the storage sheds in the dockyards and the work going on well outside the walls.

It makes Stefan wish he hadn’t shown himself to be a good runner during his first days working, all he gets in exchange are the longer routes, same pay as the other errand boys. Certainly no extra food at midday, no sir.

And it had only gotten worse since the king had talked to him, in the presence of the wizard no less! Word had gotten out about that conversation, nothing more than answering a few of the king’s questions as a witness of the attack, to his merchant boss, who now made sure to keep Stefan in hand for any message in need of being sent to the citadel.

Stefan has very much not seen the king since. And he knows why. Despite any merchant’s machinations he is just a word runner, only to be remembered for as long as words take to read or write and a recipient to be pointed out.

“Sstefan!” Shout a voice, disproving his belief in his utter anonymity.

It’s a young voice, and as he turns to where it comes from, the sidestreet he’s just jogged by to get back to the chandlers, he recognizes the face. It’s a very distinctive one.

Missing half a nose, with a split upper lip like a grove of long-scarred lip flesh and chipped front teeth. The face of the thirteen year old Ripface greets him with one of his ugly smiles.

Stefan probably shouldn’t slow down to talk with his fellow orphan, he does anyways.

“Damn Sstefan, we thoot you were dez!” Ripface jumps in excitement and speaks with his heavy lisping.

“Oh, not, well I’m here so not really.” He tries to dispel, he never did return to the orphanage after Johnny's death, but he also never considered anyone might care.

“Oh damn, thiz iz great, noh thatz you are back, ue can get the sstraglers zhe money zhey want in time!” As always, excitement made his lisp even stronger.

“Uh, what?”

“Yeah! Zhe sstragglers really needz more money now that the boss died and the losst so muchz stocks.”

“And…?”

“Well you are the besstsests at picking pocketss, so you should be a lot of help.”

“Ohh, Uhhh… Look Ripface I appreciate it, but I’m not a pickpocket anymore.” He tries to tactfully explain.

All he gets for a response from Ripface is a dumb look, as if Stefan had learned reikspiel and started speaking in it. It’s a sad dumb look, only made sadder by the prominent rip his “friend” gets his name from, apparently having arrived as Saint Sissy’s as a nameless bundle with the face already split (the chipped teeth had been a much later addition to it).

“But, then uat are you doing to get your extra food?”

“Oh, I got a job.”

“And uy didn’t you return to the orpfanage?”

“Because I got a job.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Can I get a job too?”

“Sure? Can you run fast?” Stefan asks awkwardly.

“Uh, not really.”

“Oh, well then I don’t think I can help.” He halfheartedly explains. “Good seeing you Ripface, stay safe.” And with that he runs off, making up for the conversation’s lost time.

Part of him feels guilty, it’s not Ripface’s fault, none of it. All the boy had wanted was to get things back on track with a friend’s help.

The rest of him feels alleviated that where, or for who, he actually works never came up at all. Because he doesn’t want any business with the stragglers or their pocket-picking side ventures. The tall stranger’s hold ghosts over his skin.

No more picking pockets mean no more encounters like the one that ended with him unconscious and Johnny a broken-headed lump, and that means as little contact with everything from before that night as possible. The orphanage, the Bentears(or whatever the new Johnny-less version of them goes by), the crowd running or the Stragglers, all of them. Even if that means leaving one of his year-long thieving mates behind, he’d rather keep his three meals a day and meager pay over any other option. Fuck the golden tokens, he would have stopped stealing even without them.

Swamp Town, Settler’s Cove
22st of Vorgeheim, 2538 IC /40.0.9.11.19 11 Kawak 12 Xul​

Suddenly his mouth is full of mud, as are his face, his chest, his legs and his ratty boots.

“And don’t you fucking dare come back ever again!” Shouts a voice. It may be behind him, it’s probably behind him, his head hurts a lot so Barra can’t be too sure.

He tries to get up, slips into another mouthful of disgusting algae-filled slime. Then a third time, he manages to at least get on his back with the third one.

The sky is clear, the stars are like pinpricks in his eyes. Is it already nighttime? Mannslieb and Morrslieb imply so as they hang in the sky, but they are known liars in his experience.

He then pukes into his own mouth, starts choking and has to flop around to get it out. The mud greets him again with the same coldness of his (thankfully very far away) wife. It even tastes as bad as her once mixed with the alcohol-laced contents of his stomach!

Eventually, he does find his footing with the help of the post of a long-sunk hut, and orients himself.

He doesn’t know which shitty place he’s just gotten kicked out of, his head hurts too bad when he tries to focus on its blurry shape and the light and sound coming from inside it. But the mud is watery enough that he must be near where the swamp becomes mangroves. And that means it’ll take him less than an hour to find the hole-ridden canoe he calls home.

All in all, it’s another successful night for Barra the Entrepreneur!

 

Sorry if this chapter felt like a lot of setup with little substance, but that's kinda the rule with the beginning of these kinds of short story arcs. At least y'all got a cut Stegadon out of it!

Said Stegadon calf was drawn by my good friend London , please check their awesome and varied work out! Also, have a fun lil link to my discord.

P.S. Work is going along nicely on my "Lustrian Bestiary" project(working on the mammals right now), and a few other short warhammer projects.